![]() ![]() If you can afford it, I’d go for both of them. However, while Scrivener is a little smoother in terms of the book outline and design, Jutoh blows Scrivener out of the water in terms of the ebook creation capabilities. ![]() When you consider the ability to set up an outline and write your book right in Jutoh, along with things like a name generator (which is a cool feature for writing fiction), you begin to see how Jutoh offers a lot of what Scrivener offers! Now, Jutoh is NOT a cheap knockoff of Scrivener, but Jutoh does a LOT of what you would expect from Scrivener. ![]() Here’s the cool part: the software is looking more and more like a serious competitor for Scrivener. Jutoh is extremely powerful and versatile (and I can’t say enough good about it), but there is a bit of a learning curve (as you’d expect with powerful software). There are tonnes of options out there ( Pressbooks, Scrivener, Calibre, D2D, etc.), and some are better than others.īasically, you have two goals for ebook creation:ġ) To create a professional looking ebook that looks good on a readerĢ) To ensure that your ebook uses reflowable text Different optionsįor me, I used to use Pressbooks for ebook creation (simple to use, but limited), then I moved to Scrivener (easy to use, but limited), then I moved to Draft2Digital (VERY easy to use and looks good, but limited), and now I’ve settled on Jutoh. One of the big areas that always involves is looking for improvement in the area of ebook creation. I’m always on the lookout for new options for doing the whole publishing thing in a better way. To see what is possible with interactive ebooks, I recommend Elizabeth Castro’s commentary on using location aware technology in her photo book and a demonstration of game based interaction by the French Publishing House Studio Walrus.NOTE: There is a discount code for purchasing Jutoh at the bottom of the post. Overall I found Jutoh a low cost, easy to use solution for Windows users and a good starting application for those wanting to dip their toe into the water of mobile content development. As the application matures it would be good to see some of the quiz features of iBooks Author that allows authors to create simple review questions using a graphical interface. Figure 1: Jutoh screenshotįurther formatting can be made using a set of predefined styles in the the Jutoh editor the most useful of which I found was the html style which allowed me to embed a scripted quiz question from a web page that worked correctly when tested in iBooks on an iPhone. Those who prefer the familiarity of a word processor can author content in an external editor and bring the content into Jutoh and I was able to test this by converting a Word file to a ‘filtered’ web page and importing it successfully. Currently only the iBooks app renders embedded media files, but this may be more widely supported as more ebook readers begin to adopt the EPUB 3 standard, such as Readium which was launched by the IDPF on the 13th February. Jutoh has an easy to use interface and like Apple’s Pages supports the embedding of audio and video content into an ebook page. Unlike Apple’s iBooks Author that exports to the proprietary ibooks format, Jutoh saves EPUB files, compatible with a wide range of ebook readers, and mobipocket files readable on Kindles. It isn’t open source, but at £24, the licence cost is trivial in comparison to high end desktop publishing applications, such as Adobe InDesign. Jutoh is a cross platform application that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and can also be carried on a USB stick, which allows it to be shared between workstations. Eventually I came across Jutoh, developed by an Edinburgh based software and publishing house Anthemion. I tried a range of solutions available for ebook publishing from conversion software, such as Calibre, desktop publishing applications, such as Adobe’s InDesign, to developer tools like the open source Sigil. Part of the success of an elearning technology is whether it can be adopted and maintained by learning and teaching staff – rather than technologists – and in order to promote ebooks within our department I was looking for an easy to use publishing tool that ran on institutional Windows PCs, rather than Apple hardware. In particular the adoption of interactive HTML5 technologies into the EPUB standard makes ebook publishing a promising platform for elearning resources. The ebook medium is gradually evolving from its text based roots into a multimedia format, as can be seen by the emergence of the International Digital Publishing Forum’s EPUB 3 standard and Apple’s announcement that its iBooks reader supports rich media content. ![]()
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